denise

When You Wake Up Unemployed…

26 Comments / Daily Dose, Work /

The world is weird. Very weird.

When you wake up at 3am and can’t go back to sleep because your head is so congested you actually wish it would explode, you get up and take some meds and wander out to the deck with your phone waiting for the meds to kick in.

But, there’s only one email box to check and it’s unsurprisingly empty because you’re an inbox zero kind of person and you cleared it a few hours ago and nobody sends newsletters at midnight.

There’s also no Convo (the messaging platform your little team uses to communicate throughout the day) to check.

There are no Facebook groups or pages to manage.

There are no feeds that you need to catch up on.

The internet is always slow at 3am but it’s much, much slower when you’re unemployed.

And, when you wake up again at 7:30am and open your browser … only two tabs open instead of 12.

There’s still only one email box to check, instead of three.

There’s no spam to pull. There are no problems to solve.

The internet is apparently somewhat slow at 7:30am, when you’re unemployed.

So you wander off to mow (most of) your front lawn.

And then you get your paperwork taken care of for the company you’re no longer employed by. As you seal up the company phone and get dressed so you can run it over to the UPS drop off, you discover a small problem with the aforementioned paperwork but that’s solved within two minutes. So you drive the 1 mile to drop off the box and spend 10 minutes wandering around the little five and dime store that is home to the UPS drop off and smile because you live in this tiny little town with this tiny little store. A line scratched off of my to do list and a happy little diversion, too. #Win.

When you get home, you discover a potential issue in your inbox but even that one is resolved pretty quickly so there’s nothing left to do except file for unemployment benefits.

As frustrating as that little task is, (error messages on submit, hahahahahahaha, welcome to my life), it still only took 30 minutes.

And suddenly, it’s 4:30pm and I wonder how in the hell that happened.

An entire busy day where I worked in service to myself or my family and not my company or my community. How weird is that?

So weird, for me.

I haven’t gone one single day in the last 10 years without assisting a member of my community or a co-worker. Not one. Weekends, I worked. Holidays, I worked. Vacations, I worked. I worked the day my daughter got married. I worked the days by grandsons were born. I worked the days I moved to Chicagoland and then back to Florida. I didn’t work all day, some times it was just one email or one text message or one Convo message or five minutes of pulling spam. But I have always done SOMETHING work-related.

Waking up unemployed… crazy weird and I get to do it again tomorrow. Better yet, I get to figure out LinkedIn. Oh good grief, LinkedIn. Sheesh.

When You Wake Up Unemployed… Read More »

The Walls Around Us

2016, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Fiction, Young Adult /

Here’s a Cybils shortlister that I didn’t love. I didn’t hate it, but it just didn’t grab me the way I had hoped. From the reviews of The Walls Around Us, I might be the only person who didn’t just absolutely love it.

It’s dark, it’s ghost story-like, it’s beautifully written — it just didn’t work for me. It might, however, work for you. Try it and let me know.

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Slasher Girls & Monster Boys

2016, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Favorites, Young Adult /

Thank goodness for the Cybil Awards. Slasher Girls & Monster Boys is something I probably never would have picked up on my own. I like horror, but I don’t read a lot of YA horror and I certainly don’t read short story YA horror. If they’re all like this, I should change that.

This is some of the best storytelling and the best writing, PERIOD. Read it.

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The Forgotten Room

2016, Books in Bed, Chick Lit, Favorites, Fiction, Women /

Having read everything Willig has written and most of what White has written (though only a little of what Williams has written) it’s hard for me to believe that I did not know The Forgotten Room existed until I stumbled across it on the “new arrivals” shelf. WTF?

I was a little worried about it — would it be really obvious as to which author wrote each section, particularly once I realized there were three women across three time period? (It wasn’t.) Would it be jarring to move from White to Williams to Willig? (It wasn’t.)

I really enjoyed the story but admit to spending an inordinate amount of time tracking the lineage and saying, that can’t be right because INCEST and stuff like that. lol

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The Southern Education of a Jersey Girl

2016, Books in Bed, Non-Fiction, Women /

I have no idea where I saw The Southern Education of a Jersey Girl but it caused me to reserve it at the library almost immediately.

It was ok. I didn’t hate it. Most of it. I even really, really enjoyed the pregnancy test parts. Laughed out loud, a lot. I probably would have liked it more if I had known a single thing about Jamie Primak before I read it.

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Four Graphic Novels

2016, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, Cybil Challenge, Favorites, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Queer, Young Adult /

Readathons, even #fakereadathons, mean I get to spend some time catching up on graphic novels and these four were excellent. All four of them.

Roller Girl was awesome. I loved everything about it. I hope there are more Roller Girl books.

Next, I read March Book 2 and it was good, obviously, because John Lewis, y’all.

After that, Sunny Side Up. Poor kid. This was well written and well drawn. I didn’t expect much from it and was very pleasantly surprised.

Last, but not least, Honor Girl. Loved it. And, shockingly, I loved the ending. Some people probably didn’t – those “I want a happy endinggggg.” kinds of people. Nope. It ended exactly as it should have.

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Four Non-Fiction

2016, Art, Books in Bed, cookbooks, Favorites, Non-Fiction, Women /

The #fakereadathon turned into a #fakereadathonweekend and I knocked out four non-fiction books for the occasion. Woot!

First, I finished The Bridge Ladies and really enjoyed it. I don’t know squat about bridge but when I was a kid I used to peruse the bridge column in the newspaper every Sunday and try to figure out what the heck they were talking about. Too much math for me but this memoir was pretty excellent. Moms, daughters, bridge and stuff. Go read it.

Next, I read Urban Sketching. I was overwhelmed by it. Too many words, too many sketches. I mean it’s a good book for urban sketching, I’m sure. It’s just too much. I need more white space.

More my speed, Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists. I want to own this book. Seriously. I wonder how much is is for Kindle… oh, hah. Cheaper in paperback. I’m pretty sure I will own this some day.

Last but absolutely not least, The Aunt Jemima Code. Super interesting and I was tempted to go dig through TW’s cookbooks to see just how many of the featured books were on our shelves. I’m pretty sure quite a lot. (though it’s also possible that she Kondoed a bunch, too.) Really good book.

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Reading in July

2016, Books in Bed, Reading /

It was a better month for reading but not nearly as good as I’d hoped. The RNC and DNC got in the way, darn it. Also, the social life. Goodness, the social life!

I read 9 books.

1 was an audiobook
2 were non-fiction
4 were middle grade/YA
3 were Cybils

In August, we’re doing a fake #readathon and that should help. Hopefully.

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